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Elastic Budgets and Controlling Costs
Mike Donoghue is a member of a multinational information technology corporation where he collaborates on the communications guidelines and customer relationship strategies affecting the interactions with internal and external clients. He has analyzed, defined, designed and overseen processes for various engagements including product usability and customer satisfaction, best practice enterprise standardization, relationship/branding structures, and distribution effectiveness and direction. He has also established corporate library solutions to provide frameworks for sales, marketing, training, and support divisions.
Isn’t one of the real purposes of being a project manager to keep everything within budget? Unfortunately, unrealistic expectations, improper expense information and unexpected costs are a harsh reality for many PMs, leaving many with the impression that they don’t know how to manage project budgets--let alone the projects themselves.
Stretch
To be completely successful at completing a project means also doing so within the agreed upon monetary constraints. Estimating the cost too high will earn you some managerial reproach, yet estimating the cost too low can get you more of an incredulous “You can do that?!” response--as if they want to believe in the fiction and not question the matter too closely. Financial reality sets in quickly in these situations, however, leaving a project manager with another circumstance in which they need to beg, borrow and steal funds to stretch the project budget.
Allowances for budgetary shortfalls are frequently provided to accommodate for these emergencies, albeit grudgingly. But more and more these days, the funds set aside for projects are being restricted so that the project teams are the ones that swallow these additional “expenses” by extending themselves to put in the time and effort necessary without going over budget.
For others, however, the goal to have a concrete …
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"When a stupid man is doing something he is ashamed of, he always declares that it is his duty." - George Bernard Shaw |